Posted on 04/15/2022 7:18:57 AM PDT by Red Badger
Rockets are expensive, complex, bad for the environment and prone to occasionally exploding – so alternative launch technologies are popping up to reduce their use. We wrote about SpinLaunch's remarkable kinetic launch system earlier this week, which spins a rocket up to incredible speeds on the end of a long, carbon-fiber arm in a vacuum chamber, then releases it skyward at speeds up to and over Mach 6.
Then another company dropped us a line, to show us a far simpler approach it says can get launch vehicles and ruggedized electronic cargo off the ground at nearly three times that velocity, with a quicker turnaround time. This time, it's basically a huge gas cannon.
Green Launch COO and Chief Science officer Dr. John W. Hunter directed the Super High Altitude Research Project (SHARP) program at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory some 30 years ago, and in the process led the development of the world's largest and most powerful "hydrogen impulse launcher."
This is effectively a long tube, filled with hydrogen, with helium and oxygen mixed in, and a projectile in front of it. When this gas cannon is fired, the gases expand extremely rapidly, and the projectile gets an enormous kick in the backside. The SHARP program built and tested a 400-foot (122-m) impulse launcher in 1992, breaking all railgun-style electric launcher records for energy and velocity, and launching payloads (including hypersonic scramjet test engines) with muzzle velocities up to Mach 9.
(Excerpt) Read more at newatlas.com ...
Green Launch may need a judge to overturn earth’s escape velocity.
We used to do the same thing with bamboo cannons and small coconuts. We had wars with those things.
This rugged satellite, made from off-the-shelf parts, was test-fired at 3,200 G, prepared "using good mechanical design and a small amount of epoxy." Features include a camera, GPS, communications, solar cells and a battery power supply. It remains fully functional.Green Launch
Was a puppy for me.............
Vey kewl!
And I remember some kids doing something similar with a tennis ball can and lighter fluid. They would poke a hole in the side of the can, near the bottom, pour some lighter fluid into the can followed by a tennis ball, then light it through the hole. It launched the tennis ball high into the air, with the added feature that the tennis ball was usually on fire.
Don’t even ask what we did with chemistry sets.
I stunk up the house....................
See, in 1957, I could get away with a cat, but not a puppy, and fuel for the booster was hard to get.
Ya adapt and use what ya got.
Looks like the “Paris gun” the Krauts used in WWI
Expensive then, but a true self contained fuel/oxidizer rocket.
LOL!
For us, all of the labels that said don’t mix this chemical with that chemical became nothing less than a how-to manual. And I blame Wild Wild West for our experiments with gun powder. They were always making trails of gun powder leading to kegs of powder, then lighting the trail of powder and escaping while it slowly burned.
So of course I tried the same thing on the garage floor with a pile of gun powder I extracted by opening up a bunch of my dad’s shotgun shells. I think the total elapsed time between my lighting the gunpowder trail and the whole pile going up in a flash in my face was about one millisecond. I learned from that that there are different kinds of gun powder and that TV shows aren’t reality. I also learned that dads really hate it when you ruin a bunch of their ammunition and leave a permanent scorch mark on the garage floor.
On a related note, I also eventually learned that it’s wrong to dig a pit in the vacant lot and cover it over with branches to see if any unsuspecting kids would fall in. I got that one from Tarzan or some other jungle movie.
We would have been great friends!.......................
I bet China has already gotten the blueprints and documents to this technology.
Gerald Bull's 16 inch rifle
IT’S OLD SCHOOL.................
Including satellites.
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